100 Way to the Forum" (which opened in 1962) is a joke play that requires joke- sters The show begs for the oxy- gen of outrageousness. In Jerry Zaks's peppy, acrylic revival of Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart's musical-comedy version of a Roman farce, now at the St. James, what the happy patrons get is something that fills in the oudine of an- archy without finding that giddy zone of real comic daring. Here Nathan Lane, a hardworking and expert comedy techni- cian, plays both the narrator, Prologus, and Pseudolus, a slave who connives to win his freedom by making a match for his lovelorn owner, Hero (Jim Stanek). Lane sings about liberty but seldom takes liberties, as the Old Guard comics (Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Frankie Howard, Jack Gilford, David Burns) who were employed In the show over previous de- cades did, more or less within the param- eters of the scrIpt's folderol. Lane, who is more contrived than cunning, is a kind of third-generation Xerox of those ca- vorting hybrids. He knows how to work the room but rarely improvises with the audience. Onstage, he's all perspiration and desperation but not much inspira- tion. Only once in the show, during Stephen Sondheim's fabulous opening number, "Comedy Tonight," in which the stakes of the evening's high jinks are set out, did Lane move into the impetuous comic world of no holds barred. He and the all-purpose chorus of three, the Proteans, had just delivered a promise of spontaneity and holiday to the audience- Nothing that's formal Nothing that's normal No recitations to recite! Open up the curtain. . . . Comedy tonight! -when a swarm of latecomers slowly began to make their way down the aisle to their front-row seats. Lane came downstage to have a word with them. "N ow I have to start the whole thing over," he said, in mock irritation, which is his strongest suit. He proceeded to do a hilarious potted ten -second version of the fifteen-minute song that in itself was worth the prIce of admission, and, inci- dentally, was as close as both he and the show got to the comIC sublime. A rollicking mood is what the elev- en drafts of "Forum" 's book set out to achieve; and you can hear the echo of burlesque in the rhythms of Its best payoffs. "My robe! My wreath. . . My wife!" says Senex (LewIs J. Stadlen) as the shrill Domina (Mary Testa) enters calling his name. The hokum has the in- souciance of a Marx Brothers movie, and Stadlen, who has played Groucho in his time, delivers his portion of laughs in the same goofY, wisecracking spirit. He has an easier time of it than Mark Linn- Baker, who, as Hysterium, the slave of Senex and Domina, exhibits none of the genuine comic's manic frenzy, but who comes alive, being the excellent actor that he is, in the second act, when the plot requires him to impersonate a woman-the" dead" bride-to- be, Philia. Here Linn-Baker is in his element, swatting Lane's probing small hands coyly away and asking him, "Shouldn't I have some jewelry?" Later, speaking about the scam that he and Pseudolus are working on Philia's husband-to-be- a Cretan warrior called, improbably, Miles Gloriosus (Cris Groenendaal)- Hysterium hisses, "Any coins he puts in my eyes I keep!" That's as deep as the classical allusions get in the musical, and it's a good thing: on Broadway, "Attic" means the place where you store the winter clothes. Zaks provides a few terrific sight gags of his own. No sooner has Lane prom- . d " d " h h Ise us trage y tomorrow t an t e cur- tain comes up on a cartoon "Medea," complete with lightning, a wailing cho- rus of women, and a floppy stuffed doll posturing as one of Medea's slaughtered sons. To add comic insult to injury, when the curtain comes down it hits the doll. Zaks has more curtain capers a few minutes later: during the "Comedy T 0- night" number, he brings the curtain down and then flies it back up, with prop legs dangling from it, as if the entire en- semble had levitated. There are a few moments, especially in the showstopping quartet "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid" and "The Fu- neral Sequence," when the audience it- self gets pretty high. The uneven score, the first for which Sondheim provided both lyrics and music, takes no risks; nei- ther does Zaks, which is why he's the reigning king of Broadway directors. The musical is business art, and Zaks, who knows a surefire thIng when he sees it, adheres to the ruling principle of profit: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" brings the audience to its feet, If not to its senses The show's un- relenting insistence on not thinking is finally what makes it feel old hat and ex- hausting; it's like being tickled to death. Even at its inception, "Forum" was a radical return to a time when the musi- cal was comic-driven, not story-driven- a time before the early forties, when the Rodgers and Hammerstein concept mu- sicals made the writers, not the actors, the stars of the show. That's how"com- edy" gradually disappeared from the genre's job description, and "musical comedy" became simply "the musical." T HE kinetic prowess and daring of the early low comics, which made the old musical so thrilling, have come back into the new musical via the unex- pected route of tap dancing-the trans- fer of George C. Wolfe's wonderful "Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk" from the Public Theatre to the Ambas- sador, on Broadway. The show IS not about jokes but about the African- American beat and how that beat has been transformed (and coöpted) as it has progressed through the centuries to its present, electrifying hip-hop incarnation in Savion Glover. What Glover shares with the early comics is youth, disenfran- chisement, and a kind of wild poetry. The comics were the first to bring the street onto the stage; they personified their noisy moment and didn't so much analyze it as exude it in their raw, anar- chic energy. Now the audacious t\iventy- t\ivo-year-old Glover and his group of young African-American tap dancers and street drummers have done the same. Wolfe's elegant production, which benefits from the addition of Jeffrey Wright-who delivers the rap poetry that is layered into the dancing-has put Glover's extraordinary dancing into a historical context. Nothing more needs to be said-just get there and feel the power for yourself. (I've been five times) "Bring it! Bring it!" the audience yells at the stage as the sensa- tional dancing and drumming begin; and that's exactly what the dancers do. They bring joy. They bring fury. They bring history and ecstasy. They bring the musical right up to the minute. . Also, there was storage space under the seats, with room for 47 passengers, if tightly packed.-Augusta (Maine) Kennebec Journal And very closely acquainted.